Saturday May 6, 2017
PEOPLE tend to disagree on which adjective best describes Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s strategy chief, but most agree that he is canny. So in reporting that on May 2nd, a rabbi tweeted a selfie with Mr Bannon posing in front of a whiteboard in his office, and thus “inadvertently” revealed a list of possible policies, it feels appropriate to use quotation marks.
The picture, uploaded to social media by Shmuley Boteach, who likes to describe himself as “the most famous rabbi in America”, seemingly runs through policies for changing travel to America, among other things. Some of these plans—dutifully ticked on the list—have already been attempted.
These include the suspension of a programme to admit Syrian refugees. But the pledge (as yet unticked) that is of most concern to a travel blog was “Sunset our visa laws so that Congress is forced to revise and revisit them.”
The idea seems to be to cause chaos. Taken to its extreme, suspending visa laws would, as the Skift website points out, mean that foreign workers would not be able to renew visas and international travel to America would be temporarily halted. That state of affairs, the gambit presumably runs, would be enough to persuade lawmakers to help push through Mr Trump’s travel bans from some Muslim countries, which have so far been thwarted by the courts.
Such a tactic, with all the economic and administrative woe it would entail, would be a ludicrously large hammer to use on such a small nut. No reasonable president would wield it. But the fact that it is on such a list to start with, and that Mr Bannon would allow himself to be photographed in front of it, says something about the administration's priorities. The well-being of the country’s $458bn travel industry, this much is clear by now, is not one of them.
America’s hoteliers and travel agencies have watched askance as visitor numbers from abroad have fallen since Mr Trump’s inauguration. His talk of travel bans and “extreme vetting” at airports (including demanding social-media passwords and access to visitors’ computers) clearly seem to have persuaded many foreign tourists to give the country a miss. (America’s airlines are more sanguine.
A ban on passengers taking laptops on airlines from Arab countries seems to be usefully nobbling some foreign competition.) This latest visa idea will make them fret even more.
It did not end there. Alongside other as-yet unmet pledges, such as “Repeal and replace Obamacare” and “Build the border wall and eventually make Mexico pay for it” Mr Bannon's whiteboard also lists “Finally complete the biometric entry-exit visa travel.”
The latter, as we have explained before, might well lead to horrendous queues as people try to leave the country or connect on to flights. Then again, leaving America might be the least of travellers’ worries.